A headache for Cuban women

Nothing is easy in Cuba. Even menstruating is a headache. If you doubt it, ask Marlene, a 23-year-old computer expert, who suffers when her period comes, every 28 days. On the island, sanitary napkins are known by the name, “intimates.”

They are rationed. They are sold in the pharmacies, to women previously registered, between the ages of 10 and 55. At the rate of one package of 10 sanitary napkins per head, once a month, at 1.20 pesos.

“They are awful quality, break easily, and don’t work. Then you have to buy them on the black market or in the dollar stores,” an angry Marlene explains.

“Under the table” the same packet sold in the pharmacies can cost 10-15 Cuban pesos (50 or 75 cents in CUCs). In the “shoppings”, or dollar stores, there is more choice and the quality is better. But for one package of imported sanitary napkins you have to pay from 0.90 to 1.30 in CUCs. Converted into Cuban pesos, the national money, that’s between 22 and 30 pesos. Twenty-two pesos is two days’ wages.

“It’s like a punishment for being a woman and bleeding every month,” Raisa, a 27-year-old housewife, says indignantly. “And if you don’t have “intimates,” you use pieces of old clothes, which you boil in hot water and put out to dry in the sun to disinfect them.”

According to commentary on the National Television News, In Cuba there are about 4 million women of fertile age. When interviewed, Gladys Vásquez, an official in Interior Commerce, the ministry that controls what is distributed by the ration book, takes the easy way out.

The same old thing. The Party line. The calamity of the Cuban economy is the fault of the “Yankee Blockade.” It’s to blame for everything. It’s the same if you don’t have potable water, a decent living place, your kids don’t have toys or women lack sanitary napkins. The fault lies with the “Blockade,” as they call the embargo in Cuba.

Young women like Yailén, 17 years old, a college student, ask themselves why products so necessary as sanitary napkins are sold in hard currency. The journalist does not ask the official this question, and if she had, I doubt she would have had a response.

“In Havana, everything is fine,” declares Suchitel, 32 years old, a shop employee. “In Santiago de Cuba, where I live, there are no sanitary napkins during certain months. If you don’t have money to buy them in hard currency or on the black market, then the options are to use rags, the leaves of some plant or a home-made tampon, put together with the cotton padding that they use for mattresses.” (There is also a shortage of cotton on the national market).

The same Gladys Vásquez, the official from Interior Commerce, recognizes that “deliveries have been incomplete, owing to the lack of prime materials, which are bought in China or France.” And of course she repeated the slogan: It’s the fault of the Blockade.

Many on the island are against the embargo. In addition to being inefficient, it has been a pretext for the Castro brothers to justify the country’s disasters for more than four decades.

Few believe that the day there is no embargo, there will be an abundance of ham and beef. Or that we will be able to buy Tylenol in the pharmacies. Or that high-quality sanitary napkins, like the Kotex used by Cuban women before 1959, will be sold on the ration book in the stores. With or without the embargo, the government lacks something: money. And the women, “intimates.”